BZRK ORIGINS

I should destroy this. There’s no such thing as secure data. Once a thing is written it will somehow escape. But I can’t. I never knew my father wrote anything about himself.

Mr. Stern recovered this from a laptop my father once used. A long time ago, now. Or seems a long time ago to me.

This was his story. Mine, too, though at the time I understood almost nothing of what was happening. But this is how … well, it’s at least part of how everything began.

My father, Grey McLure. Burnofsky. Lear. Even Caligula. It’s all here. And I could trash can it all, wipe it clean. Except that these are my father’s words, and he’s talking about my mother and my brother. And he’s talking about me. And I find now that every word is infinitely precious.

Soon secrecy won’t matter. Soon very little will matter. But love will matter as long as anything. And I loved my dad.

I am Plath. My enemies have come to fear that name, and I revel in their dread.

But once I was just Sadie. Sadie, who loved her dad.

I am not a brave man.

I am not well armored against fear. Fear now rules my world, or perhaps I should say
fears
plural, unless you believe that all fears are only one fear, the big one, the fear of death.

I don’t believe that. To me, fear is granular. Fear is specific. Each fear has its own smell and taste, its own picture and face.

The great fear for me now is not death. The great fear is madness. The death of a creature smaller than the periods on this page can drag me down, helpless, like being sucked into a whirlpool.

I fear that madness. I fear it so badly that I shake from it as I write this.

The things I have seen. The things I have seen. And touched, though not with my own hands.

We live in a series of comforting illusions, beginning with the illusion that we are a human; a singular, separate, and discrete object called a human. We say, “That’s a man, or that’s a woman,” and we mean only the parts that are undeniably human, and not any
of the bits and pieces that live on or in that human.

We are not, any of us, a singular object. We are an ecosystem. We are a Brazilian rain forest of life.

Some of us may understand this intellectually; we may hear the statistics about how we have more bacterial cells within us than strictly human cells. We may even make a disgusted face when we hear that fact. But that kind of fact? A bit of math? A line of data? That’s nothing to give a sane man sweaty nightmares. That’s nothing to twist his every notion of reality.

There are facts, and there is truth, and the two are not always quite the same. Facts are dry. The truth is sometimes soaked in blood.

My wife is dying. Her name is Birgid. Mine is Grey. Grey McLure.

Our son, Stone, is trying to play the stoic, and maybe he really is able to master his emotions, I don’t know. I’ve never been a great father to him. I don’t know him as well as I should. What is he now, thirteen? Hah, I’m not sure unless I do the math. Yes, thirteen. I should know that.

I’m closer in some ways to my daughter, Sadie. She’s only twelve, on the verge of becoming a woman, an old soul, a smart, perceptive girl who watches her mother waste away and demands to know why.

Why is this happening?

Sadie is angry, looking for someone to blame.

Both kids are old enough to understand about cancer, but their understanding is almost poetic. Cancer as demon. Cancer as foe. But
they have not seen what I have seen. They have not touched it. They have not walked on the surface of that tumor. They have not seen the capillaries turning to the tumor like flowers turning to the sun.

The capillaries welcome the tumor, did you know that? My wife’s own body, her own blood vessels, feed the monster within. Like slaves rushing to a murderous master. It’s an act of self-destruction, cancer is. It is the body’s own mindless suicide.

And you may think you grasp that, but like my children, you see it only in the abstract. It’s an idea to you. It’s a dry fact. But it is not yet truth for you.

Walk on the surface of a tumor and then …

I created the technology. I created it, you see, but I am not a brave man and never wanted to use it. I thought it was a job I could outsource. I thought there was time.

My great work. My brilliant work. It opened up a whole new world for me. A world of madness and terror and red, red truth.

“The Armstrongs won’t budge on biological,” Karl Burnofsky said. We were in his kitchen. Burnofsky had a daughter named Carla, a little older than Sadie, younger than Stone, I think. Carla—a terrible name for a little girl, I thought. Karl was brilliant, a true genius. But not very imaginative when it came to things like naming children.

His wife had left him long ago, and he’d raised Carla in his own fashion: a grubby apartment that stank of cigarettes and whiskey. He
could afford better; he worked for Armstrong Fancy Gifts, and they paid him well. He just didn’t care.

So his kitchen was a dimly lit maple table like something one’s grandparents might own, and greasy drapes filtering gray light from the air shaft outside, and dishes in the sink and a trash can overflowing with Starbucks cups and takeout containers. The whole place smelled of ashes, trash, and good whiskey.

Despite (or perhaps because of) his bad habits, Burnofsky was all loose skin over jagged bones. Not an ounce of fat. His daughter was pretty without being beautiful and had striking blue eyes. Her father’s eyes, I suppose, though his were bleached-out and bleary. It was impossible to imagine a young Burnofsky. He was probably my age but looked twenty years older. We’d known each other for years, worked together at times.

“There really are Armstrongs at Armstrong Fancy Gifts?” I asked. He’d told me before, but the ins and outs of a company that made souvenir snow globes and such didn’t interest me.

“Oh, there are Armstrongs, all right,” Burnofsky said. He smirked and seemed about to say more, but stopped himself. He lit a cigarette and shoved his chair back so he could lean his elbows on the table. There was a bottle of Macallan 12 between us. Burnofsky always had good booze. “I thought I might be able to get some supplemental funding for your biologicals approach. Not happening.”

I sprang my big surprise on him. “Turns out I don’t need it.”

He had Gandalf eyebrows, and they rose an inch. “You found a financial angel?”

I nodded. “Yep. They’ll own twenty percent of McLure Labs, and thirty percent of Meldcon sales, but they have deep pockets. And they’ll let me buy them out down the road.”

Meldcon was the reason anyone wanted a piece of me. It was a genetically engineered medicine that could be added to other meds to cause them to bind closely with bacteria. It was the next big weapon in the war on bacteria.

Burnofsky seemed irritated by my news and hid it poorly behind a drag on his cigarette. Then he shrugged and poured us each an inch of the Scotch. We drank to McLure Labs and financial angels.

“I have some news of my own,” Burnofsky said. “Looks like I solved the power storage issue.”

At that point we both whipped out our tablets, and the conversation devolved into pure tech-speak. Burnofsky was building something he called a “nanobot,” a very tiny machine he proposed to use in medical research, a tool that would allow us actually to enter the human body without incisions. Sort of like a laparoscopic camera but much smaller and thus able to go places where no long tube would reach. At that point his models were about the size of a grain of sand—bigger than he wanted them to be. Why the Armstrong Fancy Gifts Corporation should be interested in such a thing I did not know. And Burnofsky’s work was not some poorly funded
hobby. Hundreds of millions of dollars were being poured into it.

I was naïve in those days. I fell for the innocuous name and never so much as Googled the company. I could have easily discovered that Armstrong Fancy Gifts had gone way beyond the ubiquitous airport gift shop chain they still owned.

“Once we solve the comm issues we’ll have functioning nanobots,” Karl said in summarizing our little kitchen table geek-fest.

“I thought you were pleased with what you’d done on that.”

“Mmm,” he said, nodded, and took a drink. “But I want more range. I want a kilometer.”

That brought me up short. There was no conceivable manufacturing or medical use for nanobots that would require communicating with them over that kind of distance.

“Why so much? Even in some exotic medical application you can always just arm the patient with a signal repeater. A one-meter range would be more than enough. The power demands go up astronomically if you want a one-kilometer range.”

He changed the subject then. And I would have normally reflected on that moment and seen very quickly what was being contemplated. But that was the night I came home late, smelling of smoke and booze, and crawled into bed to find Birgid crying.

That was the night she told me about her lab results.

“Is Mom going to die?” That was Stone’s question.

Sadie’s question was, “How soon will she die?”

Want to know why Sadie posed it that way? Because even then she was a thoughtful person, and she had already absorbed the fact that all of us die. Her question was specific. It assumed death and asked for a date.

Later that night Sadie came to me in my library. Birgid was upstairs getting ready for bed. Stone was watching TV.

“I looked it up on the Internet,” Sadie said.

I didn’t need to ask what she had looked up.

“There are all kinds of treatments. But none of them work, do they?” She was calm. Not emotionless, but calm.

“Not very well, no,” I admitted.

She had just started developing the freckles she would keep from then on. They seemed inconsistent somehow with her solemn expression.

“You have to not worry about me and Stone,” she said. “You just have to help Mommy.”

“I’m going to do everything I can to help Mommy,” I said. “You know, your dad is a scientist. This is what I do.”

That sounded very hollow, and Sadie must have thought so, too, because she ignored it.

“Take care of Mommy,” she reiterated. “I’ll take care of Stone.”

I smiled. “And who takes care of you?”

“I take care of me,” she said.

After that first trip inside, I couldn’t touch Birgid.

I loved her with all my heart, or at least as much as I am capable of loving anyone, but I couldn’t touch her. I could barely stand to be in the same room with her.

The whole world around me was alien. I was alien. My God, I thought: I must never go inside myself like that, or I wouldn’t be able to go on living.

The disorientation was like nothing you can imagine.

You cannot unsee once you’ve seen.

I wondered if my extreme reaction was unique to me, but my biot tech, Donna, later had the same experience. Worse in some ways. She stopped coming to work, and later, after it all went down and I sent my security chief, Stern, to see what had happened to her, he said he’d found her in her apartment, rocking back and forth and making sounds like a cat purring.